In Conversation with Gil Rigoulet on Street Photography

Gil Rigoulet has spent some forty years behind the lens of his camera and the results are nothing short of brilliant. Indeed, he is one of those photographers that make you wonder why he’s not insanely famous. Yes, the work is that good. Go ahead, see for yourself!

Gil, you have spent your life around the camera. You have worked with a long and impressive list of names, even Henri Cartier-Bresson. What moment stands out from all of those years? What moment made you realize that photography was to be your passion, your vocation?

It is this need to see and know what to say that is important. This vision came early for me and was mastered over time. It was an instinctive vision and one full of humor, like all these photos taken in 1978 on Angleterrre. It was this year when I received a sign about my destiny as a visual writer, I was only 23 years old. I understood that above all it is a state of mind, a thought about what surrounds us; The scene that does not need a camera is a point of view. I put together a photograph that suited me, an extension of my way of thinking, and then I had this need to see constantly.

For many years you worked as a press photographer for La Monde, but also produced street photography in parallel. How did working in one genre help you in the other?

I was passionate about photos, making a living shooting pictures brought me a sense of balance. But the photos I took for a newspaper weren’t necessarily the topics I was interested in. I took time off for myself and traveled to fulfil my own calls for images in England, Rome, Czechoslovakia, Napoli, Poland, Greece, Morocco…etc. I have always known that total freedom was key to achieving an authentic and deep photographic dialogue… and most of the time I traveled alone.

I realized with time that this cohabitation with the press was not favorable to my photography.

Copyrightⓒ Gil Rigoulet

Copyrightⓒ Gil Rigoulet

Many of your great photographs are focused around bodies of water, pools, oceans, seas, etc. Why water?

Water has always been my element, I always swam. I would swim for two hours when I was in the sea – the happiness of being calm. In this vision at the water’s edge, I feel my body in this aquatic movement where I’ve melted away since I was very young: remembering holidays by the sea, and later by the pools. At the time, it was fun, we were hanging out with friends, we stayed there for hours, even without necessarily swimming, we met lots of people. It was noisy and lively, with my diving goggles I was going to find peace underwater, I was doing long apneas: I discovered these underwater bodies that were losing themselves.

I first began taking photos around the pool of Evreux, where I lived at the time. In the summer of 1984, Christophe, a Parisian friend, joined us at the pool of Evreux with a small amphibious device, the Baroudeur (HDS) manufactured by Fujica for families on vacation. A true wonder of a camera that could go down to 5 m of depth and had a very beautiful optical quality. I borrowed it for summer. Then I bought four of them, over time, and they have not left me in 30 years. With this Fujica I was finally at ease to mingle with the swimmers, above and below the surface. I followed these bodies that floated and suspended, others wandered, they all intermingled in a slow ballet. The water unveiled and imposed their unconfessed sensuality.

My gaze slid into this aquatic intimacy, as free as the water itself!

It is not prohibited to make photos freely in the pools. I continue this series but in private pools since 2014.

Susan Sontag once remarked that even the most mundane of photographs become more interesting with the passage of time. How do you feel the passage of time has affected your work?

Time loosens the mind, allows us to see what we did not know was before our very eyes. I will not say that the most banal photos become interesting over time! It is rather the gaze that matures. What seems more critical to me is how the constant formatting that we undergo in our construction, in our education, then to only have it separate us from who we are in our professional lives.

I made photos in the spirit of the trends I belonged to in the 70s and 80s. Looking at my contact sheets 20 years later, I discovered some of my best pictures long after making them. Some series emerged and were exhibited 30 years later!

Copyrightⓒ Gil Rigoulet

Copyrightⓒ Gil Rigoulet

As someone who worked for many years without social media, how do you feel about the way in which we consume media today? Is Instagram a positive, negative, or neutral force on photography?

At one time we just needed to be known in a professional environment and it went fast. It was always like that. Currently, I rarely work with the press. I work more with galleries, publishers, cultural institutions and museums. The interaction with social media is weak for them, it can often be mere communication.

Instagram is an ocean of images, we can get lost and have to suffer this incessant flow. But if your photography is mature it can be a strong communication axis that can develop our more usual networks and generate global reputation.

In many of your photographs the people seem to be at least tacitly cooperating. That is, many of your photographs do not seem to be true candids. How do you interact with your subjects? Do you ask people to pose?

In my street photographs, there is no contact with the people I photograph, rarely people interact with me. In Naples, it happened once with two Italians in a car who played with me. For the Rockabilly, I followed them for four months and the idea was that they forget I was there.

In the street or in a swimming pool, I go to the essential, it is the people who interest me. I photograph in a zone between 1.5m and 2m, it is a zone of tension, the people barely perceive me or do not pay enough attention to me, everything goes very quickly. What guides me are the acts, the expressions, those things that reveal a situation and enter the perimeter of life.

I also remain as neutral as possible, I do not release any complicated, negative waves. I feel the frame of my picture and my camera triggers instinctively. It’s a game in thousandths of a second where the consciousness has to be preceded. We are in the present and experience this fleeting photo. I never have problems with people, if I have to speak very quickly with them, I will, but it is rare. It all depends on your behaviour. You have to be master of all these situations. Do not hesitate.

I notice that you also did a lot of work with Polaroids. What was it about this format that captured your interest?

I always liked the square format and the Polaroid. The unique object, being able to show a photo made with chemistry. It must be said that all my photography is on film. In 2014, the Molitor pool reopened after 25 years of closure. I wanted to redo the photos in this mythical place that I had photographed in 1985. Unfortunately, it became a private hotel and I could not redo photos as before. I had to bring models to take the pictures. I used the Polaroid in this project as a nod to the 80s.

What equipment have you used over the years? How important has gear been to your experience as a photographer?

For all the reporting work in the press I had a range of lenses and several cameras.

But for my street photography, I have a Nikon FM2, TITAN. It is light and strong; it is a 35mm that I have had since the 70s. I shoot on TRI-X movie film.

A lot of people are much more aware of being photographed these days. Some countries, such as France, have even tightened up the laws around candid street photography. Do you find it more difficult to photograph in public today as compared with the 70s and 80s?

Everything has been disrupted in the world of photography on many fronts, there has also been, for twenty years, a wave of trials in the courts that made it clear that one could ask money from newspapers for use of photos. The right to own one’s image is reinforced. As a journalist, we managed to stop showing faces, and instead took pictures of people from behind, or we had to have authorizations for closed spaces. But that has limits also. France has become a hard country to photograph but with a phone everything is possible. And there are more and more photographers who are now interested in the street. It has become obvious that the 70-80’s were a time of happiness for this genre.

Copyrightⓒ Gil Rigoulet

Copyrightⓒ Gil Rigoulet

What comes next for Gil Rigoulet?

Currently, I am mainly busy sorting through my archives that I am beginning to show. The work is titanic … I just spent a full year scanning the images I made of France!

Otherwise, I work on series that are important to me and that I have been pursuing for the past 30 or 40 years, such as the body and the water, or landscapes from a moving car.

I also just completed a very aesthetic and intimate color series – a 3-year-long project on the Molitor swimming pool in Paris using a Polaroid SX70. And I went back to photographing the streets in London last summer. I am also working on a black-and-white series of portraits using a 6X7 medium format.

The main thing now is to show all this work in exhibitions and books. I am also preparing to give workshops.

Gil Rigoulet was the first journalist to work with the newspaper Le

Monde beginning in 1984. Their collaborations lasted more than twenty years. He worked side by side with Henri Cartier-Bresson on a supplement for them called, Portrait of the Everyday Life. During his career, Rigolet has collaborated with numerous publications such as Geo, Grands Reportages, Elle, Figaro magazine, The Sunday Times, La Republica, La Stampa, and El Pais. He continued to work for the press until 2007. Rigoulet now works on his personal photography projects, some of which were photographed decades ago but are only now being exhibited.

Michael Ernest Sweet
Michael Ernest Sweet is a Canadian writer and photographer. His work has appeared in magazines such as Popular Photography, Black and White, The Village Voice, Digital Camera, and The Evergreen Review. Michael is the author of two books of street photography, The Human Fragment, and Michael Sweet’s Coney Island, both from Brooklyn Arts Press. Currently, Michael works as a senior contributor for Photo Life, Canada's preeminent photography magazine. He lives in New York City.